Efficiency consulting: New evaporator concepts optimize OPEX and carbon footprint
DEVEX helps you save money, and we're talking about a lot of money! “The food industry is struggling with rising energy costs, but many manufacturers still lack a simple solution,” says Christoph Markmann, Managing Director of DEVEX Verfahrenstechnik GmbH. “We have exactly such solutions, whether as retrofits or new installations. We individually examine our customers' production facilities for efficiency and identify enormous potential savings in some cases.”
DEVEX acts as an experienced efficiency consultant: Efficiency consulting for evaporators in the food industry can unlock unimagined treasures in production. Markmann: "For many of our customers, this is like a valuable attic find that can be immediately monetized through our systems and retrofits."
Reducing energy requirements for drying and evaporating food
Efficiency expert Markmann immediately reveals another key point: "By reducing the energy requirements for drying and evaporating food, we also reduce the CO2 footprint to the same extent." This is important for an active contribution to climate protection, and not only because pressure on food industry companies is increasing due to legal regulations.
Practical example: Optimizing evaporators – reducing operating costs by 90 percent
An evaporator is typically used to produce fruit juices or other concentrates. With a water evaporation capacity of 3,000 kilos per hour, operating expenses (OPEX) amount to well over €800,000, with a CO2 equivalent of more than 3,000 tons.
Thermal vapor recompressor reduces operating costs by 50 percent
The existing food evaporator can be combined with a thermal vapor recompressor. This reduces operating by more than half, to less than €400,000, and CO2 emissions to less than 1,500 tons.
Multi-stage evaporator with vapor recompressor
"With a multi-stage evaporator combined with a thermal vapor recompressor," calculates Christoph Markmann, "the OPEX can be reduced to less than €150,000, or 16 percent of the original expenditure. And that's with a CO2 equivalent of less than 600 tons per year."
Multi-stage evaporator with mechanical vapor recompressor
The evaporation plant fitted with a mechanical vapor recompressor becomes the gold standard. "With an exemplary energy requirement of 70 kW for the mechanical vapor recompressor and 310 days of round-the-clock production, results in an energy requirement of 520,800 kilowatt hours per year. At an estimated electricity price of 15 cents per kilowatt hour, this amounts to €78,120 per year according to Adam Riese," says Markmann. "That's only 8.75 percent of the original cost. And the CO2 footprint drops to less than 200 tons per year."
Retrofit or all new? The main thing is to reduce costs and CO2 emissions!
Whether retrofitting or a new system: DEVEX supports energy consumption analysis, pre-engineering for sustainable process optimization, and the commissioning of DEVEX systems. "It's not uncommon for our customers to start with a cost-effective retrofit," says DEVEX Managing Director Markmann. "When we retrofit existing systems, the return on investment (ROI) is usually less than one year. Naturally, this involves lower energy and CO2 savings compared to a new system."
But even with new DEVEX systems, the payback period is impressive, usually less than two years. And it literally saves DEVEX customers millions of euros. The new system is always worthwhile, because over a lifecycle of 15 years or more, the savings far exceed any retrofit, no matter how efficient.
No matter what customers in the food industry decide, OPEX and the CO2 footprint can be drastically reduced thanks to the clever efficiency consulting provided by the Warendorf-based plant engineers. And that looks good on the company's balance sheet and in the next CSR report.